In an article in Harvard Business Review, Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn argue:

Companies can vary enormously in their operating efficiencies, and these differences can be sustained for many years. But operating efficiencies are not a competitive advantage because they can be, and usually are, adopted by other companies...

Take bar code scanning in the retail industry. The first firms install scanning equipment had a big advantage over their slower competitors. They knew on a daily and ultimately instantaneous basis what they had sold and thereby gained better control of inventory and ordering processes. But since bar code systems were not proprietary to the retailers (they had been developed and manufactured by third party firms that were all too willing to see them installed everywhere), the first movers did not sustain any advantage. A firm’s best and most innovative uses of information technology, business models, financial engineering, and almost everything else that applies to operations suffer from the same availability to rivals. What a firm can do, its competitors can eventually do as well.” (“All strategy is local”, HBR, Sept. 2005, pp. 95-104).

Do you agree with the authors’ argument? Explain why or why not.